Rhi Jackson
This chapter talked about mastery and knowing IF a student understands a subject, but also HOW to make sure your students understand it. The six facets from UbD were mentioned in the beginning because they are a way to base the different levels of understanding off of. Having enough information on every student, the book said, was a common issue for most teachers. You can never have enough information on a student because people are always changing and learning new things. At the end of this chapter, it talked about when you're first starting off teaching, there is a sort of “plan” given to teachers where every English class should be on page 70 by week two, for example. I completely disagreed with that style of teaching. There is no possible way that every class is going to be at the exact place that all the other classes will be at. Yes, as a health department, the 6th graders taking health class should be somewhat in the same area of topics as the other classes, but they won’t all be able to have the exact same syllabus and schedule because in every class there will be different types of learners and one class may have to stay on a topic for longer than another.
Synthesis
Rhi Jackson
As a class, we focused on mastery and how important it is that the students really understand what they're being taught and not just memorizing for a test. It is the teacher's responsibility to ensure that students are mastering the topics within a unit, to do this they have to truly care and want their students to succeed. One person mentioned effort-based grading, which is when a teacher grades based on how much you put into a class instead of whether or not you know or can do anything with the information. I think in some cases this can be helpful, like when students are first learning, but it doesn't help assess their understanding. Many of us mentioned using other colleagues as a way to develop a definition or way to assess mastery together so that we can understand as a whole what we think mastery really means. Mastery is also important in students future learning, not only can teachers not move on to new topics in a class, but a lot of classes are prerequisites and the information is needed to understand subjects in another class. The six facets was mentioned by one person which helps show understanding.
Sara
In chapter two of Fair Isn’t Always Equal, we think about what it means to actually master a concept rather than just memorizing information. The different being when someone has mastered a concept they truly understand it in a way that once they are tested on it they will not forget the information simply because they cannot. Some teachers are ok with students not mastering information. If they are able to produce the information on a test then they must know the information. This is not always the case though, it can be easy for a student to memorize information, take a test and move on with their life. They most likely will not remember the information in years to come, or even in months to come. This can prove to be problem some because students are not retaining the information.
It is a teacher’s responsibility to determine what constitutes as mastery. Instead of simply taking a standard test and getting a standard score, what will the teacher do to ensure that students actually understand the information. They must come up with a new way of assessing students, one that does not allow them to simply memorize for a test and then forget the information. A student’s mastery of a subject is going to be key in further education. There are certain concepts that are needed for a student to move on. For example if a student does not master the idea of addition, they will not be able to understand multiplication or any further mathematics.
Cheyenne
This chapter talks about mastery based assessment versus effort based and why the former is more important. Effort based learning doesn’t prove that students know and are critically thinking about the material, and in many cases may prove that it’s okay if they don’t know the the material. For instance, many math teachers in my high school would grade homework based on effort rather than correctness. While it may seem that it’s taking some stress off of students, it’s also not correcting them when they’re wrong. Often times, these teachers would simply walk around the room, only checking to see whether or not the homework was done and nothing more. Then, when going over corrections, they either didn’t go over all the correct answers, assuming the students knew which answers were right and wrong. They would only address the homework if asked, and then would only go over specific questions they were asked about and not the whole assignment. This way of teaching many left me behind many times over because I would be getting wrong answers and not realizing it, or I would be too shy to speak up and would never get the help I need. If these teachers had been collecting the homework and going over it for errors, there would have been a better chance of them realizing I wasn’t understanding the material and would have given me the help I need. The same goes for summative assessments that are based on effort rather than knowledge and mastery. Just because a student puts in huge amounts of effort doesn’t mean they have an accurate grasp on the concepts and underlying ideals. So while it might seem harsher to actually grade based on mastery, it ultimately leads to a far more positive outcome.
Sarah
This chapter talked about what exactly mastery is. One of the things that I learned was that not everyone has the same definition of what mastery is which makes it difficult to determine if a student has mastered a subject. One of the things that the author suggested was to talk to the school district and colleagues to see what their idea of mastery is and to come up with a common definition of mastery. The author also suggests looking at the curriculum and the standards to see what exactly mastery should mean to us as teachers and what it should mean in the classroom. One of the big ideas that I got out of this chapter was that it is important for you, your colleagues, and school district to have the same definition or general idea of what mastery means so that you can determine if your students have mastered the material or not. One of the things that the author said was that the curriculum is subject teacher’s interpretation. This will impact the way that I teach the standards and the curriculum because it is nice to know that I have some say in the way that I teach the standards and the material that has to be covered instead of the curriculum saying “say this and then say that”. In this chapter the book says “to demonstrate sophisticated mastery, we’d like students to make an inference and elaborate on how they arrived at their conclusion in writing, orally, or some other way”. This will impact how I determine mastery in each of my student’s in the classroom.
Lydia
This chapter is about determining the usefulness of certain assessments and tells you that you should only use assessments that effectively show the student has mastered the content you are teaching. It also describes tools you should use to determine what students should master. The books suggests talking to other teachers or looking at benchmarks as a few of the resources to use while determining what should be important to assess. It also explains that if you just use tests you may not have a great idea if the student has just memorized the material for the test or is actually learning and absorbing the material. All of this will affect my class because if they are just memorizing facts then they will not be able to bring knowledge to a new classroom after me. If this happens they will have nothing to build off of and will become lost in their grades ahead of them. As a teacher this will affect me because I need to effectively gauge their mastery of Social Studies and determine if they are ready for the next level. If I give out tests it should be written with thought engaging questions. This means that multiple choice quizzes and tests are not always the way to go. I must also learn from my students how to assess them properly. If I get feedback from the students I will be able to learn how to properly gauge how much they have mastered in each unit I teach. However my first year of teaching I can also ask other teachers for help and discover ideas that will work for assessing my own class.
Cory
This chapter talked mainly about mastery of material. One major point that is brought up was that there is a difference between memorization and mastery. One can only regurgitate information without fully understanding it when they memorize information; mastery requires the understanding of the information. If you ask me, information is almost completely useless if you don’t know what it truly means. According to Grant Wiggins, for one to truly understand something, a student will have the ability to explain, determine, apply, and be able to use empathy and self-knowledge. If this can be done, then a student has mastered what they have learned. They know how and where to apply knowledge. This is the primary goal of every teacher in my opinion. Every teacher must have a want or need to have all of their students master the material they are teaching them. One of the best ways to get a student to buy into what you are teaching them, therefore want to master it, is to show them how it applies to the real world. For social studies, it is rather difficult to answer such a question, but possible. If I was teaching a psychology class, I would say you will use this to figure out how others think and rationalize decisions in the real world. For a normal history class, you can use the old slogan “history repeats itself.” If one doesn’t fully understand history, then history will continue to repeat itself; for better or for worse.
Dominick
Chapter 2 mostly discussed mastery. Mastery is when you, as the student, fully understand something and can apply to situations. For example, when a student memorizes how to spell words for a spelling test and gets a good grade that does not necessarily mean that he or she mastered the words. Instead of trying to understand why the word is spelled the way it is the student memorized the words for the grade. They may have felt that this was easier, but in the long run it only makes it harder on themselves. A quote from Benjamin Franklin put this concept in perspective for me. "Tim was so learned, that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant, that he bought a cow to ride on.” This statement epitomizes what I said in the previous sentence. Mastery and automaticity are two different things. It comes back to the spelling word example. A student can memorize and automatically know the word, but for true understanding a student must conceptualize why the word is spelled the way it is. However, the definition of true understanding varies among different researches. According to Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins true understanding consists of the student being able to explain, interpret, apply, use perspective, empathy and self knowledge. If the student can not do this he or she does nit have a true understanding of the material. Nolan and Taylor believe that the best way to see if students can do this is to give multiple assignments and important works throughout the year.
Laura
I found that many of the concepts in this chapter connect to those outlined in chapter five of Understanding by Design, making them seem slightly repetitive but also reinforced. One section that I found to be quite helpful, however, was the list of resources for helping determine what is important to teach in a particular unit. I’ve always wondered how teachers decide what they are going to focus on and what to skip over (because let’s face it, it’s impossible to cover absolutely everything), despite having standards to guide them. One of my biggest fears about teaching deals with determining the content and resources that are necessary (and most relevant) to helping students master the standards, so I will definitely refer back to this list! I also don’t want to get stuck “teaching to the textbook”, which I feel could be an easy trap to fall into, especially for a new teacher. One suggestion the chapter made that I didn’t really like, however, was the use of district scripts. I don’t know if this is something I will ever encounter, but the idea of having a bunch of students from different classrooms and different schools being told to focus on the same thing on a particular day just doesn’t seem realistic. I see it as more of a stressor for the teacher, who may have to adjust their curriculum in order to follow the generic guidelines. All students and classes are at different paces and I think that a teacher should stick with the pace that works best for her students.
Rhi
This chapter talked about mastery and knowing IF a student understands something, but also HOW to make sure your students understand something. The six facets from UbD were mentioned in the beginning because they are a way to base different levels of understanding off of. I came across a part about having enough information on every student, which the book said was a common issue for most teachers. I feel like it’s impossible to ever have enough information on a student because people are always changing and learning new things. That’s a big concern for me that some of my students won’t get as much out of my classes as others will because there’s only one of me and I feel like I won’t be able to do as much one-on-one or give as much attention to every student as I’d like to. At the end of this chapter, it talked about when first starting off teaching, there is a sort of “plan” given to teachers where every English class should be on page 70 by week two, for example. I completely disagree with that style of teaching. There is no possible way that every class is going to be at the exact place that all the other classes will be at. Yes, as a health department, the 6th graders taking health class should be somewhat in the same area of topics as the other classes, but they won’t all be able to have the exact same syllabus and schedule because in every class there will be different types of learners and one class may have to stay on a topic for longer than another.
Katelin
This chapter was all about how to master the material and how to make sure we teach it and grade it in a way that is mastering. Just because we see a student get a question of one topic right, does not mean that they could do that with any problem on that topic, or be able to analyze, evaluate, and create something like it. Mastery is more than just knowing the material. They need to be able to use the six facets- explanation, interpretation, application, perspective, empathy, self-knowledge- to show that they have mastered the material. Proficiency is key to demonstrating knowledge, not just getting a question right. In math, I felt like this is especially important because students are easily able to memorize how to solve a problem, but it does not really mean that they have understood what they were doing or why, so they may not be able to apply it to another problem that was connected to the first. Especially since math builds off it itself, it is very crucial for them to be able to take what they have learned, and apply it later on. Just like chapters in UBD, it talked about how we need to make sure we know the objectives first, and what we want the students to learn. By doing this, we’re sure that we can create a lesson that will make sure these objectives are met correctly. Another thing just to point out that I love is that you can always ask other colleagues because especially when you’re new, they’ve done it and they have good insight on what is important to master.
Shane
This chapter tells us everything we need to know about mastery. In this chapter the book defines the difference between mastery and basically memorizing and parroting back the things you have been told. The book explains a lot of different things we went over in class when discussing facets. What I got out of the reading was that students can’t demonstrate mastery of a concepts if they don’t have the facets down. This also links together the concepts from the other readings about assessments. Depending on the type of assessments we give it can influence whether or not someone masters it or not. If you don’t give enough time for someone to do something they may cram and then forget. We need to learn how to assess our students I various different ways to promote the mastery that we are looking for. It is easy to study something and say you “know” it for a test, but actually getting to the depth of it is a different story. Critical thinking questions may be something you do for students instead of a question that they can get from memorizing notes. As teachers it is our job to display content and help it stick with the students. We can guide the students in the right direction and it is our job to make sure the students are doing what they need to be doing to fully master the content in our subject area. This fits well with last weeks UbD learning. We can’t just go for little details that will be memorized, give them the full picture and depth so they can demonstrate knowledge.
Cooper
The main point in this chapter seemed to be the distinction between mastery of material as opposed to simply memorizing it. The concept of having mastery of any material is that you have a full understanding of the material and you can apply it. For example if I wrote this reflection using only examples from the reading then one might rightly question my mastery of the reading on mastery because I could not make my own connections with the material. It has been proven time and time again that making deeper connections or associations with material is going to lead to lasting knowledge as we can remember things that we’ve learned from 10 years ago because of certain associations we made at the time. Conversely how many things do we have lasting memories of where the connection starts and ends with “well I had to do a test so I read all the answers right before class”? This is why it is of paramount importance that students understand why they’re learning something. If students are given context to the content they’re trying to learn they are much more likely to make connections with the material and hopefully end up with a mastery understanding of the material. Having this kind of understanding will be of far more service to them as they go on throughout their education especially when compared to the long term merit of the memorization and regurgitation of facts.
Table of Contents
Abstract
Rhi JacksonThis chapter talked about mastery and knowing IF a student understands a subject, but also HOW to make sure your students understand it. The six facets from UbD were mentioned in the beginning because they are a way to base the different levels of understanding off of. Having enough information on every student, the book said, was a common issue for most teachers. You can never have enough information on a student because people are always changing and learning new things. At the end of this chapter, it talked about when you're first starting off teaching, there is a sort of “plan” given to teachers where every English class should be on page 70 by week two, for example. I completely disagreed with that style of teaching. There is no possible way that every class is going to be at the exact place that all the other classes will be at. Yes, as a health department, the 6th graders taking health class should be somewhat in the same area of topics as the other classes, but they won’t all be able to have the exact same syllabus and schedule because in every class there will be different types of learners and one class may have to stay on a topic for longer than another.
Synthesis
Rhi JacksonAs a class, we focused on mastery and how important it is that the students really understand what they're being taught and not just memorizing for a test. It is the teacher's responsibility to ensure that students are mastering the topics within a unit, to do this they have to truly care and want their students to succeed. One person mentioned effort-based grading, which is when a teacher grades based on how much you put into a class instead of whether or not you know or can do anything with the information. I think in some cases this can be helpful, like when students are first learning, but it doesn't help assess their understanding. Many of us mentioned using other colleagues as a way to develop a definition or way to assess mastery together so that we can understand as a whole what we think mastery really means. Mastery is also important in students future learning, not only can teachers not move on to new topics in a class, but a lot of classes are prerequisites and the information is needed to understand subjects in another class. The six facets was mentioned by one person which helps show understanding.
Sara
In chapter two of Fair Isn’t Always Equal, we think about what it means to actually master a concept rather than just memorizing information. The different being when someone has mastered a concept they truly understand it in a way that once they are tested on it they will not forget the information simply because they cannot. Some teachers are ok with students not mastering information. If they are able to produce the information on a test then they must know the information. This is not always the case though, it can be easy for a student to memorize information, take a test and move on with their life. They most likely will not remember the information in years to come, or even in months to come. This can prove to be problem some because students are not retaining the information.It is a teacher’s responsibility to determine what constitutes as mastery. Instead of simply taking a standard test and getting a standard score, what will the teacher do to ensure that students actually understand the information. They must come up with a new way of assessing students, one that does not allow them to simply memorize for a test and then forget the information. A student’s mastery of a subject is going to be key in further education. There are certain concepts that are needed for a student to move on. For example if a student does not master the idea of addition, they will not be able to understand multiplication or any further mathematics.
Cheyenne
This chapter talks about mastery based assessment versus effort based and why the former is more important. Effort based learning doesn’t prove that students know and are critically thinking about the material, and in many cases may prove that it’s okay if they don’t know the the material. For instance, many math teachers in my high school would grade homework based on effort rather than correctness. While it may seem that it’s taking some stress off of students, it’s also not correcting them when they’re wrong. Often times, these teachers would simply walk around the room, only checking to see whether or not the homework was done and nothing more. Then, when going over corrections, they either didn’t go over all the correct answers, assuming the students knew which answers were right and wrong. They would only address the homework if asked, and then would only go over specific questions they were asked about and not the whole assignment. This way of teaching many left me behind many times over because I would be getting wrong answers and not realizing it, or I would be too shy to speak up and would never get the help I need. If these teachers had been collecting the homework and going over it for errors, there would have been a better chance of them realizing I wasn’t understanding the material and would have given me the help I need. The same goes for summative assessments that are based on effort rather than knowledge and mastery. Just because a student puts in huge amounts of effort doesn’t mean they have an accurate grasp on the concepts and underlying ideals. So while it might seem harsher to actually grade based on mastery, it ultimately leads to a far more positive outcome.Sarah
This chapter talked about what exactly mastery is. One of the things that I learned was that not everyone has the same definition of what mastery is which makes it difficult to determine if a student has mastered a subject. One of the things that the author suggested was to talk to the school district and colleagues to see what their idea of mastery is and to come up with a common definition of mastery. The author also suggests looking at the curriculum and the standards to see what exactly mastery should mean to us as teachers and what it should mean in the classroom. One of the big ideas that I got out of this chapter was that it is important for you, your colleagues, and school district to have the same definition or general idea of what mastery means so that you can determine if your students have mastered the material or not. One of the things that the author said was that the curriculum is subject teacher’s interpretation. This will impact the way that I teach the standards and the curriculum because it is nice to know that I have some say in the way that I teach the standards and the material that has to be covered instead of the curriculum saying “say this and then say that”. In this chapter the book says “to demonstrate sophisticated mastery, we’d like students to make an inference and elaborate on how they arrived at their conclusion in writing, orally, or some other way”. This will impact how I determine mastery in each of my student’s in the classroom.Lydia
This chapter is about determining the usefulness of certain assessments and tells you that you should only use assessments that effectively show the student has mastered the content you are teaching. It also describes tools you should use to determine what students should master. The books suggests talking to other teachers or looking at benchmarks as a few of the resources to use while determining what should be important to assess. It also explains that if you just use tests you may not have a great idea if the student has just memorized the material for the test or is actually learning and absorbing the material.All of this will affect my class because if they are just memorizing facts then they will not be able to bring knowledge to a new classroom after me. If this happens they will have nothing to build off of and will become lost in their grades ahead of them. As a teacher this will affect me because I need to effectively gauge their mastery of Social Studies and determine if they are ready for the next level. If I give out tests it should be written with thought engaging questions. This means that multiple choice quizzes and tests are not always the way to go. I must also learn from my students how to assess them properly. If I get feedback from the students I will be able to learn how to properly gauge how much they have mastered in each unit I teach. However my first year of teaching I can also ask other teachers for help and discover ideas that will work for assessing my own class.
Cory
This chapter talked mainly about mastery of material. One major point that is brought up was that there is a difference between memorization and mastery. One can only regurgitate information without fully understanding it when they memorize information; mastery requires the understanding of the information. If you ask me, information is almost completely useless if you don’t know what it truly means. According to Grant Wiggins, for one to truly understand something, a student will have the ability to explain, determine, apply, and be able to use empathy and self-knowledge. If this can be done, then a student has mastered what they have learned. They know how and where to apply knowledge. This is the primary goal of every teacher in my opinion. Every teacher must have a want or need to have all of their students master the material they are teaching them. One of the best ways to get a student to buy into what you are teaching them, therefore want to master it, is to show them how it applies to the real world. For social studies, it is rather difficult to answer such a question, but possible. If I was teaching a psychology class, I would say you will use this to figure out how others think and rationalize decisions in the real world. For a normal history class, you can use the old slogan “history repeats itself.” If one doesn’t fully understand history, then history will continue to repeat itself; for better or for worse.Dominick
Chapter 2 mostly discussed mastery. Mastery is when you, as the student, fully understand something and can apply to situations. For example, when a student memorizes how to spell words for a spelling test and gets a good grade that does not necessarily mean that he or she mastered the words. Instead of trying to understand why the word is spelled the way it is the student memorized the words for the grade. They may have felt that this was easier, but in the long run it only makes it harder on themselves. A quote from Benjamin Franklin put this concept in perspective for me. "Tim was so learned, that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant, that he bought a cow to ride on.” This statement epitomizes what I said in the previous sentence. Mastery and automaticity are two different things. It comes back to the spelling word example. A student can memorize and automatically know the word, but for true understanding a student must conceptualize why the word is spelled the way it is. However, the definition of true understanding varies among different researches. According to Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins true understanding consists of the student being able to explain, interpret, apply, use perspective, empathy and self knowledge. If the student can not do this he or she does nit have a true understanding of the material. Nolan and Taylor believe that the best way to see if students can do this is to give multiple assignments and important works throughout the year.Laura
I found that many of the concepts in this chapter connect to those outlined in chapter five of Understanding by Design, making them seem slightly repetitive but also reinforced. One section that I found to be quite helpful, however, was the list of resources for helping determine what is important to teach in a particular unit. I’ve always wondered how teachers decide what they are going to focus on and what to skip over (because let’s face it, it’s impossible to cover absolutely everything), despite having standards to guide them. One of my biggest fears about teaching deals with determining the content and resources that are necessary (and most relevant) to helping students master the standards, so I will definitely refer back to this list! I also don’t want to get stuck “teaching to the textbook”, which I feel could be an easy trap to fall into, especially for a new teacher. One suggestion the chapter made that I didn’t really like, however, was the use of district scripts. I don’t know if this is something I will ever encounter, but the idea of having a bunch of students from different classrooms and different schools being told to focus on the same thing on a particular day just doesn’t seem realistic. I see it as more of a stressor for the teacher, who may have to adjust their curriculum in order to follow the generic guidelines. All students and classes are at different paces and I think that a teacher should stick with the pace that works best for her students.Rhi
This chapter talked about mastery and knowing IF a student understands something, but also HOW to make sure your students understand something. The six facets from UbD were mentioned in the beginning because they are a way to base different levels of understanding off of. I came across a part about having enough information on every student, which the book said was a common issue for most teachers. I feel like it’s impossible to ever have enough information on a student because people are always changing and learning new things. That’s a big concern for me that some of my students won’t get as much out of my classes as others will because there’s only one of me and I feel like I won’t be able to do as much one-on-one or give as much attention to every student as I’d like to. At the end of this chapter, it talked about when first starting off teaching, there is a sort of “plan” given to teachers where every English class should be on page 70 by week two, for example. I completely disagree with that style of teaching. There is no possible way that every class is going to be at the exact place that all the other classes will be at. Yes, as a health department, the 6th graders taking health class should be somewhat in the same area of topics as the other classes, but they won’t all be able to have the exact same syllabus and schedule because in every class there will be different types of learners and one class may have to stay on a topic for longer than another.Katelin
This chapter was all about how to master the material and how to make sure we teach it and grade it in a way that is mastering. Just because we see a student get a question of one topic right, does not mean that they could do that with any problem on that topic, or be able to analyze, evaluate, and create something like it. Mastery is more than just knowing the material. They need to be able to use the six facets- explanation, interpretation, application, perspective, empathy, self-knowledge- to show that they have mastered the material. Proficiency is key to demonstrating knowledge, not just getting a question right. In math, I felt like this is especially important because students are easily able to memorize how to solve a problem, but it does not really mean that they have understood what they were doing or why, so they may not be able to apply it to another problem that was connected to the first. Especially since math builds off it itself, it is very crucial for them to be able to take what they have learned, and apply it later on. Just like chapters in UBD, it talked about how we need to make sure we know the objectives first, and what we want the students to learn. By doing this, we’re sure that we can create a lesson that will make sure these objectives are met correctly. Another thing just to point out that I love is that you can always ask other colleagues because especially when you’re new, they’ve done it and they have good insight on what is important to master.Shane
This chapter tells us everything we need to know about mastery. In this chapter the book defines the difference between mastery and basically memorizing and parroting back the things you have been told. The book explains a lot of different things we went over in class when discussing facets. What I got out of the reading was that students can’t demonstrate mastery of a concepts if they don’t have the facets down. This also links together the concepts from the other readings about assessments. Depending on the type of assessments we give it can influence whether or not someone masters it or not. If you don’t give enough time for someone to do something they may cram and then forget. We need to learn how to assess our students I various different ways to promote the mastery that we are looking for. It is easy to study something and say you “know” it for a test, but actually getting to the depth of it is a different story. Critical thinking questions may be something you do for students instead of a question that they can get from memorizing notes. As teachers it is our job to display content and help it stick with the students. We can guide the students in the right direction and it is our job to make sure the students are doing what they need to be doing to fully master the content in our subject area. This fits well with last weeks UbD learning. We can’t just go for little details that will be memorized, give them the full picture and depth so they can demonstrate knowledge.
Cooper
The main point in this chapter seemed to be the distinction between mastery of material as opposed to simply memorizing it. The concept of having mastery of any material is that you have a full understanding of the material and you can apply it. For example if I wrote this reflection using only examples from the reading then one might rightly question my mastery of the reading on mastery because I could not make my own connections with the material. It has been proven time and time again that making deeper connections or associations with material is going to lead to lasting knowledge as we can remember things that we’ve learned from 10 years ago because of certain associations we made at the time. Conversely how many things do we have lasting memories of where the connection starts and ends with “well I had to do a test so I read all the answers right before class”? This is why it is of paramount importance that students understand why they’re learning something. If students are given context to the content they’re trying to learn they are much more likely to make connections with the material and hopefully end up with a mastery understanding of the material. Having this kind of understanding will be of far more service to them as they go on throughout their education especially when compared to the long term merit of the memorization and regurgitation of facts.